As is traditional, also for this year’s wedding anniversary I made a cake. Klaus wished that it would be a mud cake, a layer mud cake to be precise. The idea intrigued me because mud cake has not exactly the best structure, so I had my doubts about making a layer cake with it as a base, but, well, how could I not accept a challenge in kitchen?
I had already made several times before Linda Lomelino’s kladdkaka, and I thought I would go with it also this time. When we visited Portugal earlier this year we bought a 10 years old Port wine we wanted to open for the anniversary, so I really wanted the cake to go along with it.
As for the filling, the flash of inspiration came the same anniversary morning: chestnut honey + thyme. Don’t ask me how. I was a little thinking about oranges but, after all, chocolate and oranges are a notorious combination. I thought to give my idea a try so I warmed up some chestnut honey, butter and fresh thyme and let it infuse for some time. By the way, chestnut honey is something not available in Finnish stores (and my stock has also run out after this cake), so you can of course use a normal honey instead of the chestnut one, the structure will not change, but the difference will be in taste, as it will be milder and more delicate. The combination of chestnut honey and thyme is absolutely heavenly. When the honey reaches its peak in taste, the thyme enhances and prolongs it. I added the honey thyme sauce while it was still warm to the cream cheese and mascarpone because I didn’t want the cream to be homogeneous, I wanted it to have some crunchy pieces on it. So, when the still warm honey sauce met the cold cheeses, it made these crunchy pieces that in my opinion fitted very well. If you prefer the cream to be homogeneous, let the honey thyme sauce cool down completely before adding it to the cheeses.
It is mind blowing, I guarantee you. This is no easy cake. It need its time to be savored, understood and appreciated. It was interesting how both Klaus and a friend of ours thought that this could even be a whisky cake, meaning that it’s one of those rare sweet dishes that would go perfectly along with a high quality single malt.
So enjoy the recipes and the photos! Scroll down for sources 🙂
- 180 g of dark chocolate
- 180 g of butter
- 100 ml of strong coffee
- 3 eggs
- 80 g of caster sugar
- One tsp of vanilla sugar
- A pinch of salt
- 15 g of butter
- 40 g of chestnut honey
- 3 thyme twigs, of about 7 cm (2.5 inches) length per each
- 100 g of mascarpone cheese
- 100 g cream spread
- 40 g of icing sugar
- Melt the butter and the chocolate in a saucepan.
- With the help a whipper, whip the eggs, the sugar and the vanilla sugar till creamy structure.
- Once the butter and the chocolate will be melted, add the coffee and the salt and stir. Add the chocolate ganache to the egg cream little at a time, mixing constantly.
- Grease the edges of two 6.5 inches (or 17 cm) and a 4.5 inches (or 12 cm) springform pan and cover the bottom with baking paper.*
- Distribute the batter into the pans.
- Bake for 15/20 minutes at 175°C.
- In a saucepan, warm at low heather the butter, the honey and the fresh thyme for some minutes, without letting it boil.
- Turn off the heather and let the sauce infuse for half an hour.
- Whip the cream cheese, the mascarpone cheese and the icing sugar till creamy.
- If you’d like the frosting to have crunchy honey crumbs, reheat just a bit the honey sauce, add it to the cheeses (passing it through a sieve so to remove the thyme twigs) and whip for some seconds. If you prefer the frosting to be homogenous, add the sauce when cold.
- Assemble the cake starting from one 6.5 inches disk, covering it completely with the frosting.
- Repeat the procedure with the second disk, putting the frosting only in the middle, so that it will stay all under the smaller base disk.
- Place the 4.5 inches disk and cover it with frosting.
- Decorate with icing sugar and fresh thyme twigs
Still a word about springform pans. Whether you have a 6, 6.5 or 7 inches pan, it really makes no substantial difference. My pan was supposed to be a 7 inches or 18 cm, but it really (I measured with a ruler) 6.5 inches or 16.5 cm.
The ceramic I used as a background is from Florim Ceramiche, to be precise the Neutra 6.0 color 07 Petrolio of Casamood. The linen towels are from LinenMe,the apron is from Son de Flor and the little bowl is from Broste Copenhagen. Thank you all for collaboration and supporting this blog!
